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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards @lemmy.dbzer0.com
OBJECTION! @lemmy.ml

Banned for calling out a mod after they claimed that criticism of Japanese Internment was "not legitimate"

https://lemmy.ml/post/28111691/17749466

This is actually insane. Another user was criticizing the New Deal era and brought up a bunch of points, I commented refuting a bunch of their points but describing two of of them, Japanese Internment and the Red Scare, simply as "legitimate criticism."

@Decoy321@lemmy.world responded "No they’re not. Those two things were caused by far greater international factors. Like, you know, the 2nd World War."

I cited a commission that found that internment was not caused by a legitimate threat posed by the Japanese but was rather caused by racism and hysteria, and that even Reagan agreed with that conclusion and signed a bill paying reparations to the victims.

Well then the mod responded that I was jumping to "inflammatory conclusions" and "personal attacks" because I assumed that when they said that criticism of internment is not legitimate it meant that they were defending internment. They continued to refuse to explain how else I was possibly supposed to interpret such a claim. I still have no idea. Apparently their stance is, "It's not legitimate to criticize the thing I oppose." If anyone can make sense of that, please enlighten me.

Since they refused to explain, I took a guess that maybe the misunderstanding was that they were interpreting "legitimate criticism" as "damning criticism," like that because a bad thing happened during that era, nothing good came of it at all. I made it clear that this was speculation and that any criticism of interpreting it that way only applied if that's what was happening.

The mod responded by permabanning me, removing all of my comments so they don't show in the modlog, and adding this:

Edit: the other commenter essentially proved that they were just baiting people into inflammatory discussion. They kept resorting to personal attacks and flip-flopped on their position solely to continue arguing. This behavior is not tolerated here. Please report such trolls in the future.

At literally no point did I "flip-flop" my position of "internment was bad, actually." Nor did I "bait" them, unless "criticizing internment is legitimate," is somehow "baiting" someone into saying "no it isn't." By far the most "inflammatory" thing that was said was when they said that criticism of internment was "not legitimate." The "personal attacks" I made were stating the fact that the position they had expressed was to the right of Reagan on the issue, and also making a quip about a .world mod defending the Red scare and Joseph McCarthy.

This seems to be a case of a clear case of PTB, the mod apparently misspoke but because they're a mod they can just ban people for calling them out instead of owning up to it.

Edit: My comments are still visible on kbin.earth (thank you @Skua@kbin.earth) so I can provide screenshots:

:::spoiler screenshots

37 comments

  • Interesting to see the "banned from community badge"

    • "criticized internment badge"

    • They added it recently to the new Lemmy-UI version since it helps making it clear that someone has been banned from a community or an instance in their comments to make people aware before replying to them. It was something I suggested a while ago based on the Badges which used to be in the Liftoff Lemmy App (unfortunately now defunct).

  • Since several people are saying, "it's impossible to weigh in without seeing what was posted," I'd like to invite @Decoy321@lemmy.world to say if anything I described was not accurate and also explain why they mass removed my comments instead of at least leaving them up in the modlog.

  • The mod responded by permabanning me, removing all of my comments so they don’t show in the modlog

    A mod can only hide posts and comments. Only an instance admin can use the purge function, but even then that leaves an entry in the modlog indicating that something has been purged for accountability.

    The only case where I could see the comments being removed and not showing in the modlog is when a mod use the option to remove content when banning, but it's still technically in the DB.

    • The entry in the modlog just shows I was banned and accuses me of "baiting," but none of my comments are visible.

      • If a mod checks the box that says "also remove user content" when banning someone, any comments and posts by the user being banned, get removed.

        In this case the removals do not get their own separate entries in the modlog.

  • With no screen shots of the removed comments, this comes down to ifs.

    if the mod's reason for the ban in the mod log is accurate, it's YDI.

    If your take of things is accurate, it's at least clueless mod, probably PTB.

    Rule 5 of that community requires some degree of personal judgement on exactly what is and isn't baiting, so it isn't necessarily power tripping to be wrong in that judgment. So, they could have been wrong in their determination without it being them just swinging mod dick, and it looks like that's what happened here, based purely on the rest of the thread that's visible.

    Not knowing the exact wording used in your comments makes it hard to make a clear estimation though, so that's all I got.

  • Impossible to provide any opinion without seeing what was actually said. Is there actually a way to remove comments completely from the modlog? I did not think so.

    • Yes, it's reserved for cases like CSAM or discussions where the mods know they would look bad.

      • Actually I think it happens automatically with the 'remove data' option enabled when banning. Purging is what you described, and only admins can do that

        Once you remove a users data, only the instance admin can see it. Nobody can see purged content (iirc). Not to be pedantic tho

37 comments